Switching made him realize that he wanted a focus, so he set about studying and learning while writing his WordPress.com blog, to get a feel for what he wanted and what his goal in blogging was.

As with many, it started out all about the blog traffic, those precious statistics that tells us who has come to call. Then something wondrous happened:

I made sure that my blog was submitted to the thousands of blog directories, that Technorati indexed each and every of my blog. I used to be curious enough in the mornings and head to the dashboard to check the statistics and if there were any comments. If they were not encouraging I would get nervous, and wondered if I was on the right path.

It helped to read other bloggers at this point. I came across others citing similar experiences and I kept writing. One thing that kept on widening was my smile immediately after I clicked on the Publish button. That smile did not expect any hits, it was from the pure pleasure of writing and expressing myself to myself.

This finally led to a stage where I really did not care about the hits. Not that I did not care about my readers, I did, but it never bothered me that so many of my posts were uncommented. I tried to hold on to what the readers expected from me, my expectations from them reduced. This was when I really started to enjoy blogging. The satisfaction of expressing myself was too strong for the disappointment of lack of the incoming links or the traffic. I still yearn for comments, because I believe they sometimes build into valuable discussions, but still not enough to discourage me from blogging.

It is a running theme on this blog for me to tell you that the numbers don’t count. The comments don’t count. Expectations don’t count. Nothing counts in blogging except that you do it well, to the very best of your ability, and you do it for the right reasons, which is not about the numbers, the comments, or the response. If you do it for those reasons, you are running a commercial blog. If you do it for the right reasons, you are blogging with passion.

You blog because it makes you happy. You blog because you know that what makes you happy to write will help others and make the world a better place. The more concentrated your topic’s focus, the more fun and passionate you are about your blogging, the more people are drawn to you automatically. It doesn’t happen overnight. It might not happen in months. But it will happen. Those who discover the wonder of your passionate blogging will return for more. They just can’t help themselves. Passion attracts an audience.

In other words, blogging is about you and your audience. Not how many, but each one. It is about connecting. It is about communicating. It is about sharing. It is about you feeling the joy of expressing yourself and knowing that someone, somewhere out there, might read it and be inspired, motivated, or changed by what they read.

Thank you, Nadgouda, for reminding us clearly of how this blogging thing works.

I usually feel slightly disappointed at not getting comments, but I’ve realized that comments are more a nature of the topic you discuss rather than how well or badly you’ve written. A dumb one-line post on a hot topic will get more comments than an excellent well written article on an obscure topic.

That’s just the nature of the beast. I personally wouldn’t let the nature of my content be affected by the level of popularity I seek. I try and cover as wide as many topics as possible within the range of my interest and I’m not bothered much if certain categories of posts get few/no responses.